Picnic at Hanging Rock Quotes

“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Nobody can be held responsible for the pranks of destiny.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Where were they going? What strange feminine secrets did they share in that last gay fateful hour?”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Even as a little girl, Irma Leopold had wanted above all things to see everyone happy with the cake of their choice. Sometimes it became an almost unbearable longing, as when she had looked down at Mademoiselle asleep on the grass this afternoon.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“The weeping elm at the window was murmurous with gossiping doves.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Everything if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete – the ragged nest, Marion’s torn muslin skirts fluted like a nautilus shell, Irma’s ringlets framing her face in exquisite wiry spirals – even Edith, flushed and childishly vulnerable in sleep.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Except for those people over there with the wagonette we might be the only living creatures in the whole world,’ said Edith, airily dismissing the entire animal kingdom at one stroke.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Marion Quade, the only member of the class to take Pythagoras in her stride, was a favourite pupil, in the sense that a savage who understands a few words of the language of a shipwrecked sailor is a favourite savage.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Sometimes just to look at Miranda’s calm oval face and straight corn-yellow hair gave her a sharp little stab of pleasure.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“She sat staring at the heavy curtains that shut out the gentle twilit garden, thinking how few things in life were un-muddled, firmly outlined as they were surely intended to be? One could organize, direct, plan each hour in advance and still the muddle persisted. Nothing in life was really water-tight, nothing secret, nothing secure.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Thinking's all right if you have the time for it.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“An unreasoning tender love, of the kind sometimes engendered by Papa’s best French champagne or the melancholy cooing of pigeons on a Spring afternoon, filled her heart to overflowing. A love that included Marion, waiting with a flinty smile for Miranda to have done with Edith’s nonsense. Tears sprang to her eyes, but not of sorrow. She had no desire to weep. Only to love, and shaking out her ringlets she got up off the rock where she had been lying in the shade and began to dance.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“There was a delicious freedom about the swift steady motion of the drag and even in the warm dusty air blowing up in their faces that set the passengers chirping and chattering like budgerigars.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“And now, at last, after a lifetime of linoleum and asphalt and Axminster carpets, the heavy flat-footed woman trod the springing earth. Born fifty-seven years ago in a suburban wilderness of smoke-grimed bricks, she knew no more of Nature than a scarecrow rigid on a broomstick above a field of waving corn. She who had lived so close to the little forest on the Bendigo Road had never felt the short wiry grass underfoot. Never walked between the straight shaggy stems of the stringy-bark trees. Never paused to savour the jubilant gusts of Spring that carried the scent of wattle and eucalypt right into the front hall of the College. Nor sniffed with foreboding the blast of the North wind, laden in summer with the fine ash of mountain fires.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“And this we do for pleasure,’ Greta McCraw muttered from the shadows, ‘so that we may shortly be at the mercy of venomous snakes and poisonous ants . . . how foolish can human creatures be!”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Why is it, Miranda,’ she whispered, ‘that such a sweet pretty creature is a schoolteacher – of all dreary things in the world . . .?”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Presently the possums came prancing out on to the dim moonlit slates of the roof. With squeals and grunts they wove obscenely about the squat base of the tower, dark against the paling sky.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenellated crags and lichen-patterned stone. Now a mountain laurel glossy above the dogwood's dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“He had been too busy with the autumn pruning the last few days to stop as he often did to admire the close growing hydrangea bushes, their dark glossy leaves crowned with clusters of deep blue flowers. Now to his annoyance he saw that one of the tallest and most handsome plants, in the back row, a few feet out from the wall directly below the tower, had been badly crushed and broken, the beautiful blue heads limp on their stalks.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“He had just fixed his hose on to the nearest garden tap when he noticed an offensive smell which seemed to be coming from the direction of the hydrangeas. Before turning on the tap he thought he had better investigate or Cook would be kicking up a shine with a stink so close to the kitchen door.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“That night the mountain mist came rolling down from the pine forest and lingered far into the morning.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Mrs Cutler, who had taken an immediate fancy to the elegant French lady, now appeared with a tray of strawberries and cream.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“A restless windy night on the Mount was followed by a calm windless dawn with residents still asleep in brass bedsteads under silken coverlets waking to the tinkle of fern-fringed streams and the scent of late flowering petunias.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Humans,’ Miss McCraw confided to a magpie picking up crumbs of shortbread at her feet, ‘are obsessed with the notion of perfectly useless movement.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“The clumsy two-storey mansion was one of those elaborate houses that sprang up all over Australia like exotic fungi following the finding of gold.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

“In Bumpher’s experience it was amazing how an ordinary housewife seemed to know by instinct things that might take a policeman weeks to find out.”
― Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock